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During a visit to the Nature and Raptor Center of Pueblo, a bird sanctuary in Pueblo, Colorado, Shutterbug reader Michelle Goodall captured this magnificent bald eagle image: “How could anyone resist taking a photo of something so beautiful?”

Every photographer has that one image they’ve always wanted to capture but just can’t pull off. For Paul Reiffer, it was a photo of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in the fog that he had been trying to shoot for over nine years.

Outdoor and travel photographers take note. The compact and rugged Pentax KP DSLR is a lot of camera in a tough, portable package, making it an ideal traveling companion. The 24-megapixel KP features a dustproof and weatherproof camera body with 67 points of sealing yet it weighs only 1.4 pounds and is small enough to fit into a laptop bag. This APS-C-sensor-based DSLR also features five-axis in-camera shake reduction, a top sensitivity of ISO 819,200, and high-speed continuous shooting at up to 7 frames per second. Best of all, if you like shooting outdoors even when the weather outside is less than optimal, the Pentax KP is designed to shoot in temperatures as low as 14 degrees F. You may freeze but your camera won’t.

Long a favorite photo subject of Shutterbug readers, this month’s assignment was your chance to share all your crazy, beautiful images of the world’s weather. We were looking for anything from lightning strikes to dust storms to deep powder to swirling tornadoes (but not too close!).

Last October Shutterbug reader Neil Williams planned a two-day trip to Asheville, North Carolina, “to get some fall color on the Blue Ridge Parkway but the weather didn’t cooperate (heavy rain and complete lack of visibility).” So, he decided to change course slightly and make a quick trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee instead.

Water Under the Old Bridge
Peda Pepic knew the shot he wanted of Stari Most (English: Old Bridge), a famous 16th-century Ottoman bridge in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina but he was running out of time.

Randy Duchaine captured this visually detailed environmental portrait of Bread & Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann in 2006 for a project on people who create unique experiences or things. “It was shot in an old dairy farm in Vermont, which is the group’s museum, and Peter showed up barefoot and gave me five minutes,” Duchaine explains.

There’s nothing quite like red to catch the eye, whether it dominates the photograph or is a spot of bright red within a complementary color field. In fact, one travel photographer we know always carries a red umbrella in his travel kit, just to add some visual spark when he’s on assignment and gets stuck with a murky, overcast day. For this “Red!” assignment, we wanted shots that popped the color as well. Boosting saturation a bit was permitted, but we asked that you kept it as close to the “real” red as you could.